@BeALert: You can do your part by slapping your hand against your forehead and groaning for about an hour.

Just tell me when to start LOL

FYI I already do this when my wife tells me a joke (assuming she can (a) remember the punchline and (b) get to the end of it without being reminded of something else and wandering off [conversation-wise] into the weeds :-)

@Max The Magnificent: Are you planning on attending EELive! 2014? If so, you owe us all a beer for the dreadful jokes

I'd love to attend these kinds of events but being in South Africa it's rather difficult. In fact I believe that US immigration has a policy to cancel all interesting events the moment I apply for a visa – the few times I've been to America have been the most boring week of the year – event wise. We can compromise – I'll buy a crate of beer (the local stuff I'm guessing?), make my wife drink it all (I'll get her to wear a Hawaiian T-shirt) and tell her the worst jokes I know. You can do your part by slapping your hand against your forehead and groaning for about an hour.

My pleasure -- FYI that feeder sounds like something others could use -- if you don;t want to commercialize it yourself (and if you still have it laying around), maybe you coudl take some pictures and write a short article on how to build it ... email me at max.maxfield@ubm.com if you're interested.

Max, your post hit close to home because it reminded me of a dearly departed diabetic cat I had in the 80s. When we first learned he was diabetic, the vet gave us the usual spiel about how he needed twice a day insulin injections and needed to eat at specific times relative to those injections.

Since my wife & I both worked full time and the cat was home alone all day and needed to eat at specific times after his insulin shot, I decided to apply some engineering creativity to the problem of timing the diabetic cat's feedings. My solution was a simple digital controller, an electo-mechanical lamp timer with multiple on/off settings, an opto-isolator, a DC motor with a rubber wheel attached to its axle and a "lazy susan" mounted in a wooden box with a retractable lid that had a single food bowl-sized opening, complete with compartmentalized feed tray section for multiple feedings per day, each identified with a piece of cardboard attached to the lazy susan that would trip the optoisolator when it ran through the slot between emitter & detector.

I knew the motor would not reliably turn the lazy susan by X degrees per second every time. I also expected the cat(s) would mess with the mechanism from day one after realizing there was food stored inside. Either even could cause the motor's rubber wheel to slip and not rotate the lazy susan by the expected amount. The opto-isolator with the cardboard tabs hanging down from a few places on the lazy susan seemed a perfect solution -- the motor would turn on at the appointed time, and not turn off until the cardboard tab passed between the opto emitter & detector, however long it took for that to happen. When it finally did happen, the next bowl of food would appear beneath the slotted opening in the hinged lid of the the containing box.

The diabetic cat lived a full life for many years with the aid of this contraption, with me giving him an insulin shot every morning before work and every night when I got home, and like Pavlov's dogs, he quickly learned to associate the sound of the DC motor turning on with the imminent appearance of food under the opening in the lid of the wood box.

The one that frustrates me the most is people who inexplicably believe that the "E" on a car's petrol/gas gauge means Empty and the "F" means Full – what would Full mean? One would have to know how big the tank is for Full to mean anything. Anyone who knows which corner of a steering wheel to hold knows that "E" means Enough and "F" means Finished. The little red line just before Enough is to warn you not to put any more in so that it doesn't explode. What I have learnt over the years is that if you have Enough in your tank, the car gets too heavy and just stops – you then have to take it somewhere for them to take some out and get it closer to Finished. The best is to keep it half way between Enough and Finished.

Had a beautiful and slightly similar one when I was at school. A friend of mine whose folks were fairly well off regularly went boating at a nearby lake on weekends. On one occasion the sister of his friend's girlfriend - who was known to be "a few sheep short in the top paddock" as the Australians say, remarked "Gee, the lake is low, look how far that boat is out of the water!" Peals of laughter from everyone present, but the poor girl couldn's see where she had gone wrong. My friend was very patient. "Ok, Debs, what happens if the water goes down another 3 feet. Is the boat going to be in mid-air?" The poor girl realised her mistake and went bright red....

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